Binary opposites
by quotegilikay
Summary: Sherlock hates the winter. John doesn't like the summer. But maybe they can learn to see things from the other's point of view.
1. Winter

**A/N- **I have no idea where this came from. But it came, and it stayed, and I wrote it. First of three parts.

* * *

Sherlock Holmes hates the winter.

In winter, the days are too short. Not that Sherlock stops just because it gets dark, but most other people do. Most other people spend more time occupying their tiny brains with crappy television and filling them with even more tedious junk, and less doing things Sherlock considers worthy of his attention and consideration. He wanders the streets at night, and they feel different. Not bad different, but not good different either. Just different. There are less people; the streets are more lonely, and they feel like they belong to Sherlock, like he's the only person in the world. And that isn't always bad, but it does get rather tedious after a while.

He finds that he has to eat more and sleep more in winter in order to keep his brain working properly, both activities which he considers dull and BOR-ING. And although he prefers to keep himself as desensitised as possible to any kind of temperature change, sometimes the cold gets to him. It makes his body less responsive, stiffer; slower to respond to any command Sherlock gives it or any outside stimuli. His brain slows down, wrapped in a kind of hazy fog that make his deductions slower and facts just that little bit harder to reach. It makes him feel ordinary, and how Sherlock hates feeling ordinary.

He knows that some people (such as his ever-puzzling flatmate) love the snow that falls in winter. But Sherlock has never been able to understand the appeal. It's cold and wet, and makes the streets slippery and everything too cold to touch.

* * *

John Watson, on the other hand, John loves the winter.

Winter is cosy, and warm. Winter is woollen jumpers and hot cups of tea.

And how John loves his tea. In winter, John makes pots and pots of tea, loving the way the liquid heats his hands through the ceramic of his Army mug and warms his entire body from the inside out. When everything and everyone around him is shivering with cold, John's cups of tea are his own small taste of paradise in a world of swirling snow and bodies huddled deep into coats for warmth.

Sometimes the cold gets into his bones and makes his shoulder ache, but with a hot water bottle, a thick woollen jumper, and of course another cup of tea, he is soon alright again. He can go out during the day, bundled thickly in his jumper and coat, without feeling uncomfortable, even when their latest case takes Sherlock and John running like madmen through various backstreets, fire escapes and alleyways around the city.

And winter means snow. John has always loved snow, ever since he was little and Harry would take him to the park, and they'd make snowmen and have snowball fights and it was magic. And it's snowing now and he smiles, because snow meant cold fingers and his favourite blue puffy jacket and the never-ending energy of childhood. Now it is memories, contented memories that make him feel safe and happy.

The cold air enters his lungs, giving him a tiny buzz of exhilaration with every breath, and exits them again with a cloud of visible steamy air that had never ceased to amuse John as a child, and even now still makes him smile occasionally. The cold stings his ears, and he loves the feeling of nestling further into his coat and being so warm while everything around him was so cold.


	2. Summer

**A/N- **Sorry it took so long to get this up. I meant to put it up a couple of days ago but I had a bunch of work I had to do and in the middle of everything I had to go back to school.

* * *

John doesn't like the summer.

It reminds him of the war, and even though maybe Mycroft was right and he wasn't haunted by the war, he missed it; it was the constant and ever-changing… _excitement… _of the battlefield that John missed, not the swelteringly hot landscape he and so many others had endured for so many months.

The heat in the city, though, is different from the heat in the desert. In the city, it is humid and obtrusive and _heavy_, pressing in on you from every direction and crowding around you like far too many people. In the desert, it is light and high up, and seems to radiate from everywhere at once, making blurry lines out of the distant horizon and mercilessly burning any exposed skin in an instant.

But the differences don't make him like it any more.

He still enjoys his ever-frequent cups of tea, but it's not as satisfying when the warmth it gives him only made him feel uncomfortable, when it makes the inside of his body just as hot as the outside.

And John finds it harder to escape the heat. In winter, he can just throw on a jumper; eat or drink something hot; or curl under a blanket, and he feels better, but in summer the heat reaches everywhere, an ever-present, too-hot second skin. It's harder to sleep when it's hot, for this reason. He wakes more often during the night, tossing and turning, covered in a thin sheen of sweat and breathing heavily after another series of snapshots of exactly what he didn't miss about the war - all those people he couldn't save, that he should have been able to save because he was a doctor and it was his job. He gets up, goes downstairs, gets a drink of water, sometimes interrupting Sherlock doing an experiment on how blood discolours various liquids (no wonder they never seem to have any milk) on the way.

* * *

It isn't that Sherlock particularly likes the summer. But he doesn't like the winter, and so by proxy he prefers the summer.

His brain works better with the heat, and everything speeds up- like reacting ethanoic acid with sodium carbonate. In summer, he doesn't need to rely on anything to keep his body at a reasonable temperature- no coats or blankets that would slow him down and hinder his movement. He can just be, and he likes that. Likes being independent. Hates relying on outside things, or people. He always has, because by relying on anything besides himself, he opens himself up to a far greater chance of failure or being let down by people whose intellect is inferior to his own. It feels like admitting a weakness.

It's not something that comes up very often, not something that many people know about him, but Sherlock loves ice cream. When he was younger, Mycroft used to take him to the shops after school, and Sherlock would get mint chocolate chip in a cup and Mycroft would get a cone with a double scoop of caramel-toffee crunch. Those memories are comfortable and secure, the ones he associates with ice cream and summer.

* * *

**A/N2- **I used Google to find that chemical reaction, so if it's not right, let me know.


	3. But

**A/N- **Hey guys. Sorry this has taken so long : /

* * *

One day, John stops as they are walking out of Bart's, grabs the arm of Sherlock's coat to stop him too, points across the street. There's snow, just starting to fall, tiny little flakes that swirl around the air, lending everything in the scene a misty overlay and sticking to the buildings, the people, the pavement, the leaves of a tree on the other side of the road. Sherlock tilts his head to the side and watches for a moment. Then he looks over at John. John has a happy smile on his face, watching too. He catches Sherlock's eye briefly, then continues on down the stairs, still smiling as the snow settles in his hair, and Sherlock thinks that maybe he can in fact see the beauty in such a pointless thing.

* * *

A couple of months later, when the snow's gone and the days are getting warmer, John and Sherlock are walking down the street, on the way back from a crime scene. Sherlock's debunking John's theory that the victim had been threatened by the man who had made her smuggle almost half a million pounds of drugs across the country and saying that instead she'd been willing participant in the whole operation. John opens his mouth to tell Sherlock that he can't possibly figure that from a hole in the woman's coat pocket, but Sherlock isn't there. Confused, he turns around, and spots the dark curly hair and upturned collar of his flat mate striding off in the opposite direction. He jogs to follow, and by the time he's caught up, Sherlock has stopped outside a small shop on the other side of the street. He accepts two cups from the young man behind the counter and wordlessly hands one to John, then strides off again, not waiting for the other man. John takes the ice cream, smiles as he follows Sherlock, and thinks that maybe summer isn't so bad after all.

* * *

**A/N2- **That's all folks! But I'm not entirely sure about the last bit. Thoughts?


End file.
